When the Department of Education last week
released the results of the latest National Assessment of
Educational Progress -- "the
Nation's Report Card" -- the bottom line was depressingly
predictable:
Not even a quarter of American students is proficient in US
history, and the percentage declines as students grow older. Only 20
percent of 6th graders, 17 percent of 8th graders, and 12 percent of
high school seniors demonstrate a solid grasp on their nation's
history. In fact, American kids are weaker in history than in any of
the other subjects tested by the NAEP -- math, reading, science,
writing, civics, geography, and economics.

How weak are they? The test for 4th-graders asked
why Abraham Lincoln was an important figure in US history and a
majority of the students didn't know. Among 8th-graders, not even
one-third could correctly identify an advantage that American
patriots had over the British during the Revolutionary War. And when
asked which of four countries -- the Soviet Union, Japan, China, and
Vietnam -- was North Korea's ally in fighting US troops during the
Korean War, nearly 80 percent of 12th-graders selected the wrong
answer.

Historically illiterate American kids typically
grow up to be historically illiterate American adults. And
Americans' ignorance of history is a familiar tale.

When it administered the official US citizenship
test to 1,000 Americans earlier this year,
Newsweek discovered that 33 percent of respondents didn't know
when the Declaration of Independence was adopted, 65 percent
couldn't say what happened at the Constitutional Convention, and 80
percent had no idea who was president during World War I. In a
survey of 14,000 college students in 2006, more than half couldn't
identify the century when the first American colony was founded at
Jamestown, the reason NATO was organized, or the document that says,
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal."
Numerous other
surveys and
studies confirm the gloomy truth: Americans don't know much
about history.

Somewhere in heaven, it must all make Harry
Truman weep.

He never attended college and had no formal
intellectual credentials, but Truman was
an avid, lifelong student of history. As a boy he had devoured
Plutarch's Lives and Charles Horne's four-volume Great Men and
Famous Women, developing an intimacy with history that would later
become one of his greatest strengths. "When Truman talked of
presidents past -- Jackson, Polk, Lincoln -- it was as if he had
known them personally," the historian David McCullough wrote in
his landmark biography of the 33rd president.

Truman may have been exaggerating in 1947 when he
told Clark Clifford and other White House aides that he would rather
have been a history teacher than president. Yet imagine how
different the NAEP history scores would be if more teachers and
schools in America today routinely imparted to their students a
Trumanesque love and enthusiasm for learning about the past.

Alas, when it comes to history, as Massachusetts
educator Will Fitzhugh observes, the American educational system
imparts a very different message.

While the most promising high school athletes in
this country are publicly acclaimed and profiled in the press and
recruited by college coaches and offered lucrative scholarships,
there is no comparable lauding of outstanding high school history
students. A former public school history teacher, Fitzhugh is the
publisher of The Concord Review, a
journal he began in 1987 to showcase the writing of just such
exceptional student scholars. The review has printed 924
high-caliber research papers by teenagers from 44 states and 39
nations,
The New York Times reported in January, winning a few
"influential admirers" along the way.

But this celebration of what Fitzhugh calls
"varsity academics" amounts to just drops of excellence in the vast
sea of mediocrity that is American history education. Another kind
of excellence is represented by the
National
History Club that Fitzhugh launched in 2002 in order to
encourage middle and high school students to "read,
write, discuss, and enjoy history" outside the classroom.
Beginning with a single chapter in Memphis, the club has grown into
an independent national organization, with chapters in 43 states and
more than 12,000 student members involved in
a rich array of history-related activities.

"Our goal," says Robert Nasson, the club's young
executive director, "is to create kids who are life-long students of
history." He and Fitzhugh have exactly the right idea. But as the
latest NAEP results make dismally clear, they are swimming against
the tide.

We believe that the Constitution of the
United States speaks for itself. There is no need to rewrite, change
or reinterpret it to suit the fancies of special interest groups or
protected classes.